The Writing Process

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.

- Octavia Butler

What is the Writing Process?

I don’t mind admitting I was a little slow in college. Despite having earned a bachelor’s degree in English and accepting a teaching job while I worked on my master’s degree, the first time a professor mentioned the “writing process” to me, I had no idea what she was talking about. I was in a graduate seminar aimed at preparing us to teach college-writing courses. She was standing at the dry-erase board, waiting for me to list out the steps so that we could discuss some strategies as a group for helping our students learn and understand the process.

I started describing what I thought was the writing process. I wasn’t too far off, as I discussed re-writing one of my papers eight times and then letting my wife read it before turning it in. “Okay,” she said. “But let’s just stick with the basics. What are the general steps of the process?”

I looked at one of my classmates who was giving me the look—you know the look—like, “Dude. Are you serious?” Finally, he mouthed the word, “pre-writing.”

So I said, “Pre-writing?”

The professor wrote it down. “And?”

I looked to my new best friend, and he mouthed, “Writing.”

And then it clicked. “Writing,” I said, like everybody knows this—why are you wasting our time even asking? It’s so obvious. And then I confidently finished, “Re-writing.”

“You mean revising?”

“Sure.”

“And?”

Crap. I looked at my classmate, but he shrugged.

“And revising some more?”

She wrote down Editing and Publishing.

We went around the room and shared some strategies for each step. One student had an idea for bringing in newspaper clippings for an editing activity. Another student suggested voice-recorders in the pre-writing stage. I shared a few ideas—nothing stellar—just enough to earn my participation points and hopefully not look like a complete idiot.

But I felt like an idiot. None of the concepts were new, per se. I had been writing for years, and I had incorporated all of these things, but why had I never been taught the phrase, “writing process”? Why had I never seen it plotted out in these neat steps: pre-writing, writing, revising, editing, and publishing?

Now that I look back, I think the answer is simply that I had forgotten. I’m sure in my first-year writing course my instructor, a graduate student from New Hampshire, probably used these phrases ad nauseum. I’m sure in my sophomore and junior-level courses, where I was taught not just by competent instructors but actual published writers, the writing process was discussed at length. But I’m also sure, like 90 percent of the stuff I learned in college, I filed it away and promptly forgot it.

Why, if I was so quick to forget the steps of the writing process—even though I was an English major and a decent writer—would I now include a whole chapter on the writing process in my textbook?

Why do I talk about it almost daily with my students? Am I a hypocrite? Am I out of touch with reality?

Simply put, it’s because I believe in it. Even though I didn’t quite know the terminology as a student, at an instinctual level I understood the writing process. Perhaps more importantly, I understood my writing process. When I was given an assignment, I knew how to get started. I knew how to get the ideas flowing, how to organize them, how to commit them to paper. I knew how to clean up my papers, how to make them shine.

Ultimately, that’s what I hope for you. I want you to understand the writing process, but more importantly, I want you to understand your own writing process. If, after this course, you forget the difference between revising and editing, if you can’t remember if free-writing is part of the pre-writing or the writing stage, that’s okay, as long as you know what it takes (and how long it takes) for you to write a paper that will get you a good grade, that will make you proud, and that other people will actually want to read.

But if you ever find yourself in a graduate seminar aimed at teaching you how to become a writing instructor, it’s a good idea to commit some of this stuff to memory ahead of time. 

The Traditional Writing-Process Model 

If you flip through various textbooks or conduct an Internet search for “writing process,” you’ll end up with something comparable to this:

You might, of course, find fancier graphics, and they might use words like drafting instead of writing, or re-writing instead of revising, but more or less they will look something like this.

It seems pretty straightforward—and it is—but I have found that the illustration is rather lacking. It was actually conceived in the late sixties and early seventies, when researchers and educators tried to make flow-charts and visualizations of everything. It didn’t matter what the theoretical concept, they would sketch a black-and-white chart and paste it into a book. And thus was born this visualization of the traditional writing-process.

Take a moment to think about your own writing process. When you are given a writing assignment, exactly how do you get started? Where do you go for help? How do you finally produce something worth turning in?

Now ask yourself, “Does this traditional model really look like my writing process?” Chances are it doesn’t. If you think about it, you might notice two fundamental flaws to this conceptualization: first, that it implies each step requires the same amount of time and effort; and second, that each step must be completed in the proper order with no going back. 

Misconception the First: Equal Weight and Time 

The first flaw in the traditional model is that each step is represented in identical chunks. The implication is that each step should use up roughly the same amount of your time. If you have spent a total of four hours producing a paper, then one hour will have been dedicated to pre-writing, one hour to drafting, one hour to revising, and one hour to editing. The reality, however, is that your time is never (nor should it be) equally distributed in this fashion.

The next time you write a paper, if you keep track of how much time you spend on each step, you will likely see that much more time is spent on some steps than others.

I have observed many people as they write, and I have found that what distinguishes inexperienced writers from experienced writers is how much time they spend on the particular steps of the writing process.

Inexperienced writers tend to spend a few minutes, if any at all, pre-writing, and then huge chunks of time drafting (usually the night before it’s due), and then a few minutes editing before turning it in.

Inexperienced Writers:

Experienced Writers: 

Experienced writers, on the other hand, tend to spend a great deal of time revising. They have good pre-writing strategies, they plow through the drafting stage just so they can get something on paper, and then they spend most of their time and creative energy re-writing their paper. I often hear them remark that revising is the “fun” or “enjoyable” part of writing, while drafting is the worst part.

If that’s true, then it’s no wonder inexperienced writers so often declare that they hate writing and that it’s hard. It’s because they’ve spent 90 percent of their time in the onerous stage, drafting, and have given themselves very little time for the enjoyable stage, revising.

Quick story: 

My sophomore year of college I had to write a paper on American Naturalism. I stayed up late Sunday night and showed up to class early Monday morning with the paper still warm from the printer in my hands. It wasn't great, but it was done. The professor taught her lesson and never mentioned the papers. After class, I handed it to her and said, "you forgot to collect these." She informed me they weren't due until next Monday. 

At first, I was grouchy, but then I was kind of relieved that for the next week, while my classmates would be fretting about theirs papers, I could relax. But later that day, as I was driving home, I started thinking about my paper. What was that weird analogy I tried to make in the introduction? And that title! So when I got home, I spent a half hour fixing some things. The next day, I thought about a book I checked out that I never even looked at. So I thumbed through it and found some good quotes. I spent another hour or so adding them to the paper. This went on all week--fifteen minutes here and twenty minutes there--until next Monday finally arrived. I handed in my paper feeling genuinely proud. And I had every right to be. Thanks to my inability to read a calendar, it was easily the best paper I had ever written. I got an A, and the professor asked if she could publish it on her classroom site as a sample for other students. 

But I also felt sneaky, like I had cheated the system—like writing a paper was a timed race, and I had gotten an unfair head start when no one was looking.

Not long after, when another paper was approaching, I was talking quietly with a classmate before the lecture. "Dude," I said. "I figured out the secret to writing awesome research papers." 

He seemed intrigued and leaned in. 

"You write it a week before it’s due, and then you just keep tinkering with it a little every day until it’s perfect.”

There was a moment of silence. “That’s it?”  

“Yeah.”

“That’s not a secret,” he said. “They’ve been telling us that since seventh grade.”

He didn’t get it. I shared my secret with a few other friends and classmates, but was met each time with a similar response. I began to realize that my secret wasn’t so secret, and I hadn’t cheated the system—I had done exactly what my teachers had been begging me to do for years.

That experience led me to change my approach to writing. After that, I would try to write my papers at least a week before they were due—nothing fancy, just a quick-and-dirty draft—and then I would leisurely tinker with them until the due date. The quality of my writing improved drastically, and I also began enjoying writing assignments. Not long after, I switched majors. Since I had cracked the code on writing papers, I might as well be an English major. 

Misconception the Second: Sequential Lockstep 

The second flaw you might have noticed in the traditional model of the writing process is that it implies you must complete each step in order, never skipping or going back. You don’t write until you’re done pre-writing. You don’t revise until you’re done writing. And you don’t edit until you’re done revising. 

But that’s not the way life works. It usually goes down like this: your professor gives you an assignment (point A), and you complete that assignment (point B). What happens between point A and point B is not a neat, straight line that follows the steps in order. Instead, it looks more like a scribble. You constantly go back and forth. You might write a few lines (writing) and then go back and re-write them (revising) and then write a few more (writing), and then look something up online (pre-writing), and then rephrase something (editing), and then write some more. It’s a constant, recursive looping and hopping and skipping and jumping, sometimes dedicating only seconds to one stage before moving on to another.  

Researchers and professors have known for decades that this is what really happens, but I suppose it’s just easier to print the straight-forward traditional model. If nothing else, it serves as a good starting point to discuss the writing process with students.

The Art of Procrastination 

Did you know that procrastination really isn’t a bad thing? Instructors often tell you not to procrastinate, but really, what they’re trying to say is “be sure to leave yourself enough time.” Some people actually perform better under pressure, and writing a paper the day before it’s due isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Procrastination becomes a problem, however, when you don’t leave yourself enough time. If you know and understand your own writing process, it’s much easier to pace yourself and allow yourself enough time to pre-write, write, revise, and edit. If, for example, you know it typically takes you eight hours to write a five-page research paper, then you should allow yourself that full eight hours, even if it’s the night before the due date. 

Part of understanding your process is being honest with yourself about your attention span and endurance level. I know that I cannot commit to writing for more than a couple hours at a time. My head gets fuzzy and my shoulders begin to ache. So even if I can carve out eight hours the day before something is due, I'm only going to get two quality hours and then six painful and ineffective hours of writing. Since I understand my process and I'm honest about my limitations, I space out my writing so that if I know a project will take a total of eight hours, I start at least four days before it's due and work on it a couple hours each day. 

The next few papers you write, try to keep track of how long it takes you and what your main obstacles are. You don’t have to carry a stopwatch and log every second, but try to remember in general how long it really took you to find those articles, to scratch out an outline, to bang out a draft, and so on. You'll develop a good sense of how long it takes you to write a paper (and chances are it's longer than you think). That way, when your upper-division psychology professor tells you to write a twelve-page paper using ten sources, you can say, "I know exactly how long that's going to take." And you will allow yourself enough time to adequately bounce between the steps of the process and produce something you're proud to turn in, and something your professor is delighted to read. But if you try to cram a fifteen-hour project into six hours because you didn’t realize how long it would actually take, it will be a miserable experience for everyone involved. No one wants to write that paper, and no one wants to read it.

For an amusing and enlightening take on why we procrastinate (and what to do about it), watch Tim Urban's TedTalk, "Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator."  

 (If the embedded video doesn't work, try this link: https://youtu.be/arj7oStGLkU)